Sworn to secrecy about their work, 50-odd members of Pope Paul's advisory commission on birth control met last week for three days of discussion at Rome's Spanish College. Their job is to prepare a report for the Pope to help him formulate an authoritative position on the Roman Catholic Church's most vexing issue. But so far, the experts are widely divided.
The commission members include doctors, moralists, sociologists and population experts from a dozen countries, nine from the U.S. Among them are those who favor "the pill" as a licit method of birth limitation, such as Canon Louis Janssens of the...